


Return

by breathedout



Series: Passchendaele ficlets [10]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Illness, Intergenerational friendship, Intragenerational friendship, Loss, Nursing, Recovery, Somehow this is the only ficlet in the "Passchendaele ficlets" series, World War I, which actually takes place in Passchendaele
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-04 22:01:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18821608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: Passchendaele, Belgium: September, 1917."Comeaway," Rebecca said, again. "When was the last time you slept, child? She's in the clear."





	Return

**Author's Note:**

> The folks over at [femslashficlets](https://femslashficlets.dreamwidth.org/) on Dreamwidth are hosting a year-long, 15-ficlet challenge where all the prompts are Janelle Monáe lyrics. I'm using them to create a little cycle of exercises using characters from the three established or hinted-at f/f pairings in the original novel I'm working on. So all of these tiny character studies will be related to one another, and all except three of them will be either Louise/Hazel, Rebecca/Katherine, or Emma/Maisie. Anyone interested in getting to know my characters a little bit as I flesh them out is welcome to follow along!
> 
> This story was written for the prompt "Come, let me kiss you right there wake you up like sunrise."

"Come _away_ ," Rebecca said, again. "When was the last time you slept, child? She's in the clear."

"I know," said Hazel. "I will, I—Yves is coming to relieve me, I only—"

"There are, you know, other qualified nursing staff about the place. Besides Yves." That mean eyebrow, of Rebecca's. "In case you hadn't noticed them, here in this field hospital." 

Hazel squinted up at her. Snorted. 

"Listen to you," she said. "Yves is rubbing off."

Something complex happened in the relationship of Rebecca's mouth to her eyebrows: a half-flinching, half-softening; a drawing-together. Hazel thought at once, confused: _has_ Yves been rubbing off? Did the two of them—speak, without Hazel present? She was subject, for a strange moment, to a poorly-aligned attempt on the part of her never-very-pictorial brain to transpose, on the one hand, an image of Yves, leant back in his chair in the makeshift organising office they'd knocked up in the front room of the narrow red-doored house on Vernon Street, as he'd pinned Hazel—perched next to Geneviève on the bay window-seat—with that laughing-incredulous look of his and taken her to task for some supposedly _hopelessly academic_ suggestion she'd made regarding an upcoming leafleting campaign; and on the other hand, an image of Rebecca, huddled up in the pew of the little church in Lizerne with its back wall blown mostly away, her tired eyes coming up to meet Hazel's, her hand reaching out of her bundled shawls to offer a thermos of weak tea. Hazel failed utterly to combine the two of them: to imagine what they might say to one another, or how they might say it. And she thought, simultaneously, with a guilty flash to all the overflowing wards of soldiers outside this tent: when was the last time I truly observed a face, apart from Louise's?

"We're both concerned," Rebecca said. Hand on her shoulder: warm; Hazel shivered. "We worry about you."

Hazel sighed. Looked down at Louise: still sleeping, her wasted face and the veil wrapped about her naked head. She'd stopped clawing at it, once her fever had broken. Before that she'd torn it off in her sleep, fretful and weak and afraid. Hazel wasn't the only one who had seen her bald head; nor who had seen her before that, eyes wide and panicked, looking down at her hand which had reached to wipe at her sweat and had come away full of her own hair. She'd panted; screamed. Hazel had left her with Yves and called the barber, and when they'd come back Louise was still sobbing and someone—Esmée?—was in the room with a fresh jug of water. Hazel was sure there'd been others, even putting aside Yves and Rebecca. It was, as Rebecca'd pointed out, a field hospital. Louise might not remember, though, when she woke up. Hazel wondered if she ought to say: _No one has seen you but me._ She wondered if Louise would find it in any way a comfort. 

A squeeze at her shoulder; Hazel looked up. Rebecca's gaze was on Louise, not on her, and: the way she looked at her. It wasn't as though Hazel exactly _forgot_ that Rebecca'd raised a daughter and two sons; or that the three of them, Jack and Maisie and Paul Jr., now married or serving or both, had once been children. It was only that it came home to her at times with a strange jolt how very little idea she herself had about child-rearing. Croup, she thought, vaguely. Measles. Was Louise, fussing a bit now in her sleep, reminiscent of a tiny Maisie? Was Hazel reminiscent—however inaptly—of Rebecca herself?

"Could you post something for me?" she asked Rebecca; and Rebecca's eyes snapped back to hers. A suspicious look. 

"Yves is coming to relieve you, you say."

"Yes, I—he'll be here in—." Stifling a yawn. "Half an hour, at most. And if you could take this," rummaging in her satchel, "then I can go directly to bed and—"

"Of course," Rebecca said. Her hand left Hazel's shoulder in order to take the envelope. Hazel felt the shift of Rebecca's body, behind her: taking in the name. _Patrick Macdonald, Esq_. Hazel closed her eyes. 

"He's arranged for a transfer to a private sanatorium," she said. Mostly steady. "I've let him know where to wire the funds."

Slowly: the return of Rebecca's hand, at Hazel's nape. Stroking. 

"It's primarily for tuberculosis," Hazel went on. "But they've agreed—and it's in Switzerland. Davos, well away from the lines. She should be fine there until—it's safe for her to ship home, or." She cleared her throat. "To Boston." Breathe. "He's arranged for her to stay with his sister, in Boston. Part of the. Agreement."

She braced herself against the horrors of _Louise will have a thing or two to say about that_ or _Do you suppose she'll approve of those terms?_. But after a moment Rebecca said only, "I'll send it at once." Then her hand was gone from Hazel's nape. Hazel looked over her shoulder to see the canvas of the tent-flap falling back into place: she and Louise were alone. 

The sky out the opening of the tent had been, for once, something more than grey. Pinks and golds; Hazel wondered for a moment, dizzy with exhaustion, if the sun were rising or setting. But—rising, it would be. Louise's fever had broken in—the afternoon, it had been the afternoon previous; and then Louise had slept, and in the blackness when she was just a shadow against the white pillow Hazel had watched her sleep. Thinking: _Boston_ ; and _I never even kissed her_ ; and _She will live, she will continue to live_. 

Rebecca had carried a lit lantern, Hazel recalled, when she had first come in. But now the light in the little tent grew, and strengthened. Hazel shifted on her camp chair. In the cot Louise gave a little moan; a little shudder; and opened her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Details of Louise's illness are based on the account of Florence Farmborough's convalescence from paratyphoid fever in Peter Englund's _The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War_ , which I highly recommend!


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